A despicable comparison

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This article was published 11/05/2023 (1059 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

‘They ruined it for me this year, the political leaders standing on their soapbox pretending that they care, pretending… they understand the sacrifice, not understanding that their actions are exactly the actions our brave men and women in uniform were fighting against.” — Alberta Premier Danielle Smith podcasting during the pandemic — late 2021

“Referring to people succumbing to the ‘charms of the tyrant,’ including Hitler, she said, ‘we’ve seen it. We have 75 per cent of the public who say not only ‘hit me but hit me harder, keep us away from those dirty unvaxxed’.’” — Calgary Herald columnist Don Braid

There wasn’t much coverage in the news this week of the 78th Anniversary of VE-Day. There was plenty of coverage 28 years ago, because that was the 50th anniversary. Fifty is a much more appealing number than 78.

Perhaps there will be more coverage 22 years from now — there’s something significant about the number 100, too.

For the Adler family and many millions of others, every anniversary of that day is large. Seventy-eight years ago, Nazi forces surrendered to the Allies in Europe — surrendered to the Americans, the British, and the Canadians, among others.

Seventy-eight years ago this week was the first time in a long time that my father, sitting in a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp, and my mother, a war-battered 11-year-old child in the Budapest Jewish ghetto, had been given a reason to hope they would not be murdered by the Nazi empire.

Had it not been for this surrender, my chances of having this visit with you were nonexistent. I was born nine years and three months after VE-Day.

On Monday of this week, on the 78th anniversary of a critically important day in the lives of millions of families whose ancestors fought the Nazis in Europe and families whose ancestors were mass murdered in Europe, a tape was released of former podcaster, now Alberta’s premier, Danielle Smith, courting her anti-vax followers — telling them she wasn’t wearing a poppy.

She was rejecting the symbol of patriotic sacrifice in the two world wars because she felt the leaders of Canada hadn’t learned the lessons of war and were behaving like the dictator who triggered the Second World War. She went further, and said those people who took the vaccine were blindly following the government just like those who unthinkingly, followed Hitler. How many sheep in Alberta got vaccinated? Seventy-five per cent of them, said the then-not-yet premier, in comments recorded only a year and a half ago.

My paternal grandmother’s life was extinguished in her early forties in the mass murderer’s oven at Auschwitz. I never got to know her.

But my maternal grandmother Elizabeth survived in a different concentration camp. The Nazis were working her to death. But my emaciated maternal grandmother was liberated just a short time before she became physically useless as slave labour and would most certainly have been murdered. That was 78 years ago, as Hitler’s vision of world domination was collapsing because of the heroism of Canadian soldiers and their allies.

My maternal grandmother told me as little as humanly possible about her captivity in the Nazi concentration camp — but the numbers on the tattoo on her arm spoke volumes to me as a young child.

Every time I saw that tattoo, my curiosity was stoked.

One thing she told me repeatedly was to always express gratitude every chance I got for Canadian Forces.

She felt she owed her life and her daughter’s to the sacrifices made by Canadians and their allies. Did she wear a poppy? Absolutely! I cannot imagine how she would have reacted personally to an elected Canadian official disrespecting the most visible symbol of Canadian sacrifice.

And this returns us to this month’s Alberta provincial election.

The fight to preserve Canadian democracy has many chapters. One of them is being written in Alberta where a premier is on record as saying three-quarters of the population were willing to abandon democracy and vote for tyranny by going for the jab.

I think there may be some Manitoba eyeballs on this column who share a similar thought. I am not here to convince them they are wrong.

But I swear on the grave of my maternal grandmother, that comparisons between vaccination and Nazification are the product of disordered thinking. If conservative candidates want to exploit this vile poppycock for political gain — federally or provincially — they will be pulling a Danielle Smith, humiliating their fellow conservatives.

charles@charlesadler.com